craftastic!

yeah, i know... it's been forever since i updated, but hey... we've had a LOT going on. and when there's been spare time, i've been doing CRAFTY stuff.

first of all cookies. oh COOKIES! so you know we're having a cookie bar, right. all homemade by yours truly. I've started mixing up the cookies and wrapping the dough and freezing it (so i can un-thaw and bake like the day or 2 before). -side note... my sister is doing all this for the party in texas, THANK GOD!   so this is what my kitchen has been looking like lately:

Oh and in case i haven't mentioned it... i have a bit of carpel tunnel. and spending forever trying to perfectly cream butter and sugar together and then mix everything well... and then doing it over again, and over again... well THAT has been KILLING my hand and wrist. like for serious... OUCH! a couple of weekends ago, after i whipped up a couple of batches of oatmeal cookies, i decided that this just wasn't going to cut it. if i have to whip up batch after batch of these... i needed HELP! I had a talk with the man and proposed going and purchasing the stand mixer from our registry. after all, we'd gotten a nice amount of money as a gift, so we could use it to purchase the mixer and it would be like someone bought it for us.

guess what i did a few days later:

this thing is freaking fantastic. it weighs like, as much as i do and we have absolutely NO space for it (have i ever mentioned we have a tiny kitchen with no counter space and limited storage?) but i love it. it's so fast, it's so easy and it has made cookie mixing a breeze. seriously, i can have a batch in well under 5 minutes. additionally, there are like 3049850394853 different attachments you can buy for it, and i can't wait to get the pasta roller attachment! we added it to the registry and totally plan on buying it if no one else does (as we do with most of the stuff on the registry... but whatever)

since we'll have a few hundred cookies, i realize they may all not get eaten. so, i picked up some which paper bags to set up with the cookies so people can take them to-go. i wanted to somehow jazz up the bags somehow and decided to use the cute wooden stamp i had made. i'm sure you all admired it when you got your invitations, riiiight?

i thought it gave it a cute enough personal touch without actually ordering and spending way too much on personalized bags. i don't know if i've mentioned this before but i got inspiration for our stamp from a bracelet the man bought me from james avery for christmas last year.

since i received it just a couple weeks after we got engaged, my wheels were already turned and i decided i'd love to incorporate the infinity symbol somehow. especially since it sort of went along with how he proposed... he placed the ring on a christmas ornament

see... today, tomorrow, always... infinity... all the same thing, right?

so anyway, i was inspired by that, and have tried to tie it into things from the invitations to my jewelry.

the latest project we completed last weekend was our card box. i didn't want to same thing everyone else has and i didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a box. so i got all crafty, found an unfinished box, cut a whole, bought some stain, some letters, some paint and some glue...

i think that's about it. we've run into some technical difficulties and won't be having a cupcake tower here in Illinois. not sure how we're going to do it in texas, though. i guess i still have to figure that one out.

our shower is on sunday, so i'll try and update about the shower and my awesome craftastic gifts for our shower hosts.